Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain: Academic Freedom in the Aftermath of 9/11 by Ellen Schrecker

Back to Volume One Contents This article was posted on February 22, 2010, and is a corrected version of the article posted in January, 2010. Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain: Academic Freedom in the Aftermath of 9/11 By Ellen Schrecker How many of the three hundred people who gathered around the Dalton Trumbo Fountain in front of the University of Colorado’s student center on March 3, 2005, to hear Ward Churchill speak understood the irony of the location?1 Trumbo, a successful screenwriter and Colorado alumnus, had been one of the so-called “Hollywood Ten” who were imprisoned and blacklisted for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Churchill, like Trumbo an outspoken radical, had just become the target of a nationwide campaign to eject him from his position as a tenured professor of American Indian studies on the Colorado faculty. In a hasty essay, written to explain why the perpetrators of the attack on the World Trade Center would have been so hostile to the United States, he had characterized the 9/11 victims as “little Eichmanns.” That unfortunate phrase, unremarked at the time, emerged with a vengeance three years later in conjunction with a planned speech he was to give at Hamilton College in upstate Copyright American Association of University Professors, 2010 AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 2 Volume One New York. Catapulted into notoriety by right-wing bloggers and talk-show hosts, Churchill then came under attack by Colorado politicians, who forced the university to investigate and then dismiss its controversial faculty member. Because Churchill’s outrageous comment and sloppy scholarship were to provide ammunition for his critics, his case does not seem quite as clear-cut a violation of civil liberties as Trumbo’s conviction for contempt and subsequent blacklisting. But, in the late 1940s, as Trumbo was fighting for his First Amendment rights, most contemporaries refused to support him. He was a Communist—and everybody knew the Constitution did not protect Communists. So, one wonders, will the University of Colorado have second thoughts once the current furor subsides? Admittedly, it may be too soon to answer that question, but a closer look at what happened to Churchill may give us some insight into the current state of academic freedom. It was the Emerald Society of Rockland County, New York, that touched off Churchill’s troubles when its members protested Hamilton’s appointment of Susan Rosenberg to teach a one-month course on memoir writing in fall 2004. Hired by the college’s Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture, Rosenberg, a 1960s radical and member of the Weather Underground, had been connected to the fatal Brinks robbery of 1981. Arrested in 1984 as she was delivering an automatic weapon and 740 pounds of explosives to a storage facility in New Jersey, she was serving a 58-year sentence when she was pardoned by President Clinton in 2001, apparently because of her exemplary record in prison. Until her Hamilton appointment unleashed a storm of protest, she had been teaching quietly as an adjunct at the City University of New York. Shaken by the unfavorable publicity, Rosenberg and her Hamilton sponsors backed down and cancelled the course. When the by-then controversial Kirkland Project announced its speakers for the coming semester, a political science professor noted that Churchill was on the roster. When he discovered the “little Eichmanns” essay on the Web, the professor forwarded it to the administration, urging them to cancel Churchill’s appearance. He also alerted the editor of Hamilton’s student newspaper, who published an article about 3 Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain Ellen Schrecker Churchill’s 9/11 piece on January 21, 2005. Five days later, the Syracuse Post-Standard ran the story, which got picked up by a conservative Weblog. Within hours (such is the power of the Internet), hundreds of readers were contacting the Colorado press and politicians. Then, on January 28, Bill O’Reilly jumped into the fray, claiming that Churchill should be arrested for sedition and calling on his viewers to demand that Hamilton cancel Churchill’s appearance.2 Deluged by thousands of e-mails, Hamilton’s administration initially stood firm. It had, it is true, forced the Kirkland Project’s director to transform Churchill’s planned address on prisons and Native American rights into a forum on his controversial article. But, as the school’s president Joan Hinde Stewart explained on January 30, free speech was at issue; were Hamilton to call off the talk, “we would be abandoning a principle on which this College and indeed this republic are founded.”3 For a president who had only just begun her tenure at a campus already polarized by her predecessor’s plagiarism, Stewart’s attempt to protect free expression was commendable, though temporary. Two days later, citing her responsibility for the “safety and security of our students, faculty, staff, and the community in which we live” in the face of “credible threats of violence,” she cancelled the speech.4 Other cancellations followed, as many schools, including Churchill’s own, panicked at the prospect of hosting such a notorious speaker. A few institutions—the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater; and the University of Hawaii–Manoa—did give the controversial scholar a platform. As was the case at Hamilton, Colorado’s administrators initially cited safety concerns in their decision to cancel the lecture, but when a group of students sought an injunction against them, they reversed themselves and, on February 8, let the scheduled event take place.5 Addressing a standing-room audience, the embattled professor lashed out at his critics and mounted an impassioned defense of his scholarship and activism. By then, it was no longer a matter of being allowed to speak—Churchill’s job was on the line. Colorado’s Republican governor, Bill Owens, had called for his dismissal. While claiming that “[n]o one wants to infringe on Mr. Churchill’s right to express himself,” Owens had AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom 4 Volume One insisted, “We are not compelled to accept his pro-terrorist views at state taxpayer subsidy nor under the banner of the University of Colorado. Ward Churchill besmirches the University and the excellent teaching, writing, and research of its facility [sic].”6 The legislature had unanimously voted for a resolution demanding that Churchill be fired and two local talk-show hosts took an ad in the Boulder paper demanding his dismissal. In response, the university’s Board of Regents held an emergency meeting on February 3 at which the interim chancellor, Phil DiStefano, announced that he was about to launch a preliminary investigation of Churchill’s writings and activities in order to ascertain whether there were sufficient grounds for taking action against him.7 A day later, the university’s president, Elizabeth Hoffman, addressed the Boulder faculty. Already damaged by a football recruiting scandal, Hoffman invoked the McCarthy era as she cited the threat to academic freedom that Churchill’s case might pose.8 Within three days, she was gone, forced out by the governor and the regents because, as she later explained, she had refused to obey Governor Owens’s demand that she “fire Churchill tomorrow.”9 Controversy was nothing new for Ward Churchill. A prolific public intellectual, Churchill’s thirty-seven-page (now about fifty) C.V. listed two dozen books and hundreds of articles. Many, like his “little Eichmanns” essay, are highly polemical attacks on the past and present policies of the federal government, published by small presses and obscure journals far outside the academic mainstream. A longtime activist in American Indian affairs, Churchill’s confrontational style and radical politics had earned him enemies on both the right and the left, as well as on the Boulder campus. The fact that he claimed to be speaking as a Native American particularly outraged his former allies within the faction-ridden American Indian Movement, who called him a “wannabe” and tried to destroy his reputation as a Native American spokesman and scholar.10 Whatever his background (and I am in no position to judge that issue), it is clear that Churchill’s energy, intelligence, and literary skill made him one of the Indian cause’s main public voices. In any event, given his take-no-prisoners rhetoric, his message—that whites have committed a form of genocide by undermining Native American 5 Ward Churchill at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain Ellen Schrecker culture—was bound to alienate many both within and outside the academic world. But, as one of his supporters noted, “While at times tendentious and almost always pushing the envelope, if not tearing it to pieces,” Churchill “has helped to shape the discourse of the modern Indian rights movement.”11 His academic career was unorthodox, though not quite as aberrant as his critics suggested. He began teaching courses in Indian studies in the University of Colorado system in the 1980s, while also working as an administrator in the university’s American Indian Education Opportunity Program. By 1991, when he received his first regular faculty appointment as an associate professor with tenure, he had already gained a national reputation. According to Evelyn Hu-DeHart, then the head of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America, even though Churchill could have been hired directly as a “special opportunity” candidate, the center mounted a national search before offering him a position. Since he may also have been under consideration for a full professorship at another institution, Colorado’s administration, which wanted to increase the “cultural diversity on campus,” felt under some pressure to make the appointment.

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